


Sand in His Teeth

by ColebaltBlue



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes (Downey films), Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Boxing, Gen, Pre-Canon, mild depictions of addictive behaviors, really a Downey films story but could be read as a Doyle pre-canon AU, sports related violence (not explicit)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-25
Updated: 2018-11-25
Packaged: 2019-09-18 08:32:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16991574
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ColebaltBlue/pseuds/ColebaltBlue
Summary: Life has made John Watson eat sand when he stumbles into an illegal boxing ring and has an interaction that will change the trajectory of his life.  How much of meeting Stamford was pure chance and how much of it was all part of Holmes's Great Game?For tassynicole, who is not on AO3.





	Sand in His Teeth

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to my beta who not only read and encouraged along the way, but also had no problem helping do the hard work of figuring out what worked and what didn't.

The oily fog slid between the tightly packed buildings, twisting and turning with the medieval streets of London, the tendrils creeping into open doorways and windows, coating everything it touched with a greasy film and choking every living thing that could not escape its inexorable progress through the city. 

He had been foolish once again, and the fog chased him, whispered to him, and dogged his every step as he wrapped his threadbare scarf over his nose and mouth and hurried down the dark streets. He hated London in that moment. He hated London in most moments. He hated the cost of his lodgings and the way that his half pay disappeared too quickly into the bookie's hands or the gin bottle. He hated the smell, the sounds, and the feel of London. He hated that he hated everywhere else more.

When he had stepped off the _Oreste_ a few long months ago, body broken by typhoid and soul broken by Maiwand, he had planned to go to Edinburgh to his brother's. To take over the family business if there was anything left of it, but a single letter awaited him at mail call when the troop ship arrived. It from his brother's wife - he had drunk himself to an early grave. An accidental drowning of course, but the result was the same. Here was his pocket watch, she wrote, but the rest she pawned to pay the bills, she hoped he'd understand. 

He didn't understand the pocket watch - he and his brother had never been close and no object owned by his brother could carry value to him, sentimental or otherwise. He didn't understand the accidental drowning either - could no one have helped a drunk face down in a gutter? But the drinking - the drinking he understood. The Watsons were drunks. Like his father before him, and his father before him, John Watson's brother had carried on in the proud Watson tradition and was a drunk.

John Watson was not a drunk.

Tomorrow, he told himself as he dragged himself out of bed to face another day. Tomorrow, he would find an officer's club and make connections and find a situation. He was a doctor and he had no doubt London was in need of doctors, more so than Edinburgh would've been.

He skin itched uncomfortably from the moment he stepped into the officer's club, as if his fever was to return at any moment. However, the card games were a friendly diversion at first. Just something to pass the time as he made his connections and sought out a situation for himself. It was easy. He was good at cards. 

But the club was full of men returned from war and looking for connections just like him. Unlike him, those men were all richer than an Army doctor on half-pay, healthier than a man three stone down from fever who twitched at loud noises, and better connected than the son of a Edinburgh doctor of no particular note who had neither attended the right schools nor could call upon the familiarity of mutual acquaintances who had surely been there too. He was just a washed up war fatigued battle surgeon who somehow survived a battle that was nothing but an embarrassment to the British Army. 

He did not need to stare his failings in the face every night. A broken remnant from a horrific battle that alternately provoked pity and platitudes. Everyone wanted to hear his story - some wanted the the glory and others the gore. Everyone had time for the spectacle of failure of the Afghan campaign sitting uncomfortably in a chair in a London club. No one had time for an injured army doctor in need of a life that did not remind him of that. 

It was worse than the campaign, he realized, and clutched at his cards with hands he could not keep from shaking. At least he wasn't a drunk, he reassured himself.

Tomorrow, he told himself as he promised quit the officer's club and the card games and try something else. 

The fog followed him home that night. Its greasy fingers coated his clothing, shoes, and hat. It tried to follow him into his lodgings, but the malaise contained therein chased it back. John Watson looked around the small spare room and packed his bag. He could not afford this life any longer, as austere as it was already. Tomorrow he would find new lodgings and a new plan.

John Watson wished he were a drunk - it'd make it easier to bear. 

The passage of time was marked by the need to scrape together the rent money every so often. He lost days to the relapse of the fever, shaking alone in his bed in his cold dark room without even an orderly to come by and change the sheets. And, he lost days to the heady call of the gambling hells and pubs that he stumbled to and from. Oh, the heady rush of the chance, the possibility, the luck and always just one more. It repeated it over and over: next time, next time, next time, just one more.

Weeks passed. Months. The thick dark brown London fog was his only companion. 

One night, he had stayed too late in the pub, tossing the dice with a regular, betting small and playing low stakes, more to pass the time than anything else. When he opened the door the fog was waiting for him, so thick he couldn't see the other side of the street.

"C'mon, I know something better," grunted the man standing next to him. Watson followed him, a stranger that remained nameless despite the intimacy bourne of hours spent at dice and cards together. He followed the man through the crooked alleys and dark streets, lost as much from the twists and turns as he was from the fog that hid anything he might have used as a landmark. The man led him into another pub, rougher than any he had been in so far, and straight through to the back, down a set of rickety stairs, and past a man who eyed him up a down for a full minute after his companion had uttered the pass phrase. He nodded them both in, satisfied at last.

The boxing ring reminded him of Candahar. Dry, dusty, hot, and splattered with blood.

The men in the ring reminded him of Maiwand. Bare, brutish, fierce, and battered to pieces.

One was large and cauliflowered eared. His muscles bulged under his skin; sweat glistened and accentuated the peaks and valleys. He flexed and John Watson remembered the anatomy lab at St. Bart's - the corpse flayed open in front of eager faces who carefully marked notes with pencil stubs, deltoid, trapezius, latissimus dorsi. 

The other fighter was small, dark, and grinning with bloodied teeth. He had been face down in the sand when John stepped up to the walls of the ring. The boxer spat in the dirt, clearing the sand and blood from his mouth. His eyes were wild. A second look proved he wasn't all that small, just compared to his opponent. And he wasn't all that dark, but the dusting of hair on his chest, arms, belly, and the shadow of an unshaven face played tricks in the flickering light of the ring. He spat the blood out and grinned again, eyeing his Goliath with a surprisingly cool and calculated gaze. 

A bookie shouted for bets. Watson pulled out a note and pressed it into his hand. "On the small one, knock out, next round."

The bell dinged. The David crouched. Fists flew. The Goliath fell. John Watson took his winnings, more than he expected, and bought a drink for the man who had brought him here - a favor owed and repaid. He bought another, then another, then another. 

John Watson was not a drunk, but that night he understood how easily he could be. He counted the winnings that were left - enough to pay for his room for another week. Tomorrow, he told himself, tomorrow he would find something respectable.

Tomorrow found him in the back room of the pub, pressed against the walls of the ring. The same man was inside. He could see the bruises that marred his torso and his face. Bruises that had been left the night before, the week before, that were fading no doubt from the month before. The man won easily, John saw, but he lost just as easily and that was confounding.

Shilling after shilling, night after night. 

John Watson drank and he placed bets on the boxer. 

Then, one night as he watched the fight, the boxer slammed into the boards next to him.

"Next fight, three rounds, knockout," the boxer said for his ears only.

John Watson breathed in the heady smell of blood and sweat, of sand and heat and pain, and he felt it course through his veins.

He shouted for the bookie and placed his last five shillings into his hand and took his note. 

He tried to find the boxer afterwards, to thank him, but John Watson was drunk - off the gin or the win he had no idea. He took his money and he left.

He lost his way in the fog. John Watson was indistinguishable from any other drunk. He wandered, his only regular companion the fog, as he staggered in and out of the weak pools of light cast by the lamps. He heard the heave click click of the patrolman's boots and slid into a dark doorway. He heard the scuffle-scrape step of a fellow lost soul walking in time with him down one long winding block. Dogs barked, cats yowled, people yelled, and London breathed on.

He didn't hear the step of the man who came up behind him suddenly, stick pressed hard against his throat from the arm that reached over his shoulder and held him fast. He was frogmarched him into a black mews and the tobacco saturated breath of his assailant overpowered the stink of sewer and fog. He coughed and choked and attempted to protest. 

John Watson struggled for only a moment: he felt the revolver press into his back and he stilled, pressed fast against a wall. 

"I have a pocket watch and forty shillings in my pocket. They are yours if you let me go."

A hand groped at his waist, around his torso, slipped into his waistcoat pocket and pulled out the watch. The revolver disappeared and a match was struck. The phosphorus burned in his nose for a brief moment. He heard the click of the watch case opening, then snapping shut.

"Very fine," said the man. "Fine enough to get you killed around these parts. Pawned often enough before, yet still protected in a pocket alone now. Curious."

John Watson was stone cold sober as he felt the grimy oily wetness of the rough brick press into his cheek. He thought of the troopship and the soldier who had lain sick on the cot next to his, only to die before they made it home. He thought of Maiwand and watching his orderly be cut down in front of him, not spared a quick death and perfectly aware that there was no hope for him; he thought of the beatings dealt out by his father. It would serve him right to die here in this alley a drunk - just like his brother. John Watson was not a drunk, but he was about to die like one.

The hand returned the watch. It patted at his coat pocket and removed the bills. 

"You do not belong here," the voice said.

He grunted in agreement. If he were to die, he would not die a liar.

"If you'd like to hang around illegal boxing matches, we could use a doctor, but you don't want this life. You've been in hell already. Quit trying to go back."

They were both silent.

Finally the man said softly, almost gently, "three right turns and left. Don't come back or it won't be me that robs you. Drink coffee at a place like The Criterion, not gin at a place like The Punchbowl."

The weight at John Watson's back disappeared and it was silent. 

He moved toward the light and emerged onto the street. The fog was clearing, driven away by some shift in the wind or temperature. He started walking. Then turned right, right again, right a final time, and then left and found himself on the stoop of his boarding house.

He climbed the steps, counting them slowly, one foot at a time, one to seventeen, he stumbled on the last one, forgetting it was there. Eighteen, it felt odd, like there were too many. He fell into bed and was surprised to feel the crinkle of paper at his breast. He rolled over and slid his hand into his coat pocket. Twenty shillings. The bastard had only taken twenty shillings. Half his winnings. He laughed until his stomach hurt, he laughed until tears ran down his face, he laughed until his neighbors banged on the thin wall and shouted at him to stop. He laughed until he fell asleep.

The next morning he woke up - head painful and fuzzy. He stood at the washbasin and shaved his cheeks clean and trimmed his mustache neat. He took his twenty shillings and he set out on a walk in the daylight. There was no fog today, the air was clear and crisp. He breathed deep and felt the sun warm his face. It was midday and he sat on a park bench and watched the people stroll when the sign caught his eye. 

The Criterion, it said. 

He stepped inside. It was quiet and calm and smelled like coffee and beef wellington. He stepped to the bar. 

"John Watson, upon my word!" The jovial voice accompanied the tap on his shoulder.

He turned to look. "My god, Stamford, is that you?"


End file.
